Orson Welles said a film studio was the best train-set a boy could have, but The Life Aquatic is something else: Anderson uses the sound stages of Cinecittá like a kid playing with toy boats in the bath. He makes one hell of a splash. - EDIT

Given how hard it is to find new ideas in mainstream screen sci-fi these days, the film does a creditable job of repackaging standard speculative circuitry under a sleek new blockbuster carapace. - EDIT

This atavistic Christians-vs-Moors narrative doesn't belong in the present day, and that's no doubt why so many people are addicted to it: it's so ideologically overstated that it can easily be brushed off as harmlessly quaint escapism. - EDIT